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dateMore Than a Year Ago
subjectComputers And Society
authorThe New Yorker
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Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?
From ACM Opinion

Is Ad Avoidance a Problem?

Back in the twentieth century, people were roughly equal in their power to avoid advertising.

How Facebook Makes ­s ­nhappy
From ACM Opinion

How Facebook Makes ­s ­nhappy

No one joins Facebook to be sad and lonely.

What It's Like to Get a National-Security Letter
From ACM Opinion

What It's Like to Get a National-Security Letter

In the summer of 2011, while he was fighting an indictment for alleged computer crimes, Aaron Swartz, an information activist, read Kafka’s "The Trial" and ...

The Prism
From ACM Opinion

The Prism

An extraordinary fuss about eavesdropping started in the spring of 1844, when Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian exile in London, became convinced that the British government...

Strongbox and Aaron Swartz
From ACM Opinion

Strongbox and Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz was not yet a legend when, almost two years ago, I asked him to build an open-source, anonymous in-box.

Laptop ­
From ACM News

Laptop ­

Gregory Nagy, a professor of classical Greek literature at Harvard, is a gentle academic of the sort who, asked about the future, will begin speaking of Homer and...

The Medium of the Moment
From ACM Opinion

The Medium of the Moment

After the Boston Marathon bombings, the process by which breaking news and information are generated and disseminated looked more ragged and exposed than ever: ...

The End of Stanford?
From ACM Opinion

The End of Stanford?

Is Stanford still a university?

Moral Machines
From ACM Opinion

Moral Machines

Google's driver-less cars are already street-legal in three states, California, Florida, and Nevada, and some day similar devices may not just be possible but mandatory...

An Open Letter to Wikipedia
From ACM Opinion

An Open Letter to Wikipedia

Dear Wikipedia, I am Philip Roth. I had reason recently to read for the first time the Wikipedia entry discussing my novel "The Human Stain."

Steve Jobs: 1955
From ACM Opinion

Steve Jobs: 1955

Steve Jobs is dead. One big question is whether the unbelievably innovative culture he forged will live. Jobs was not a great human being, but he was a great,...

From ACM Opinion

The Names

As long as it took to find and kill Osama bin Laden after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, it has taken even longer to commemorate the thousands...

In Praise of Distraction
From ACM Opinion

In Praise of Distraction

For many Americans, March Madness has been a time to worry about office pools, busted brackets, and buzzer beaters. For American businesses, though, the N.C.A...

How the Internet Gets Inside ­s
From ACM Opinion

How the Internet Gets Inside ­s

When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming...

Shigeru Miyamoto: Master of Play
From ACM Opinion

Shigeru Miyamoto: Master of Play

The many worlds of a video-game artist.
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